Don’t tell me you already knew this, or I’m going to be more than a little miffed at you for not telling me. Occasionally, I would come across a JSTOR article during my research and skip it because I didn’t have a subscription—and it didn’t seem worth it for the two or three articles I wanted to read each year.
But when I was researching the unknown British soldier buried in the Lexington, Massachusetts, Old Burying Ground, I contacted the curator at the Lancaster Infantry Museum in the UK because I wanted information from a reference titled “47th FT Boston, Lexington, Concord & Bunker Hill,” written in 1775. The curator told me the catalog reference referred to an article entitled, “The British Expedition to Concord, Massachusetts, in 1775” by Allen French, published in the Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research.
The only online copy I could find was on JSTOR.
I really wanted to read this article. I checked the public libraries within a 60-mile radius—none subscribed to JSTOR. A nearby college had a subscription, but its contract did not allow it to give me access. I can’t access my alma mater’s databases off campus, and it’s too far to visit. So I finally looked at the subscription prices.
I signed up for a free personal account, which allows me to read up to 100 journal articles online every 30 days. For about $20 a month, I could upgrade to unlimited reading and 10 downloads each month, but the free personal account more than meets my needs.
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I'm not embarrassed to say I did not know that. I have accessed JSTOR articles through my library privileges at my alma mater. Free is a wondeful four letter word.
Guilty as charged.
Screenshot helps me to save paragraphs I know I'm going to want to quote.
I wonder how much other "stuff" is out there that would benefit from public resurrection?
Maybe https://www.academia.edu/ ?